The preoccupation in Marguerite Duras with questions of gender and sexuality may be usefully theorised by drawing on ideas central to feminist psychoanalysis. While the creation of a female counter-cinema in Nathalie Granger enabled Duras to question dominant structures of representation, ultimately her films went beyond the dichotomies of gender and sexuality. Although, Nathalie Granger implicitly reproduces the conventional constructions of gender by creating separate 'masculine' and 'feminine' spheres, it can be seen that Duras was beginning to question and deconstruct all gender categories. In terms of feminist psychoanalytical theory, India Song questions the categories of gender and sexuality constructed by the patriarchal Symbolic order by foregrounding the Imaginary. Agatha mirrors transgressive relationship and quasi-incestuous adolescent relationship, as the film resonates with the off-screen voices of Duras and Yann Andréa who also appears on the image-track where he represents Agatha's anonymous brother.

This chapter suggests that although Noémie Lvovsky's films seem to develop from early social engagement to a focus on mainstream comedy these later films should, nonetheless, be read in relation to wider socio-political discourses. The main characteristics of Lvovsky's first feature film are clearly anticipated in her short Dis-moi oui, dis-moi non, which formed part of her FEMIS graduation work and was released, to critical success, in 1989. Lvovsky's first feature film, Oublie-moi returns to these central preoccupations, in which the paralysing fear of decision articulated in Dis-moi oui, dis-moi non through the static camera, long takes and close framing continues. The box office success of Les Sentiments triggered a marked change in Lvovsky's profile that can be linked to the film's clear generic framework (dramatic comedy), an (over)familiar narrative and stellar ensemble cast.

Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo's La noche de los girasoles/The Night of the Sunflowers provides an archaeology of Spain's rural memory, where the rural emerges as traces of a violent and monstrous nightmare, which haunt the urban consciousness. This chapter shows that this tension is played out in the complex representation of landscape in the film. The landscape is primarily one of loss, trauma and fragmentation: it registers a nation unable to reconcile itself with its recent rural past and articulates a greater desire to nurture and preserve a way of life that is fast disappearing in the present. The discussion of the film contributes towards our understanding of the contemporary shifting structures of rural Spain, and its increasingly complex location in the national imaginary. The legacy of the rural genre appears to haunt the film and to find its most vivid expression in its representation of violence and landscape.

By the spring of 1953 it was clear that British cinema had found a film-maker who could handle the technical demands of the thriller in a cinematic rather than a purely theatrical fashion. With The Yellow Balloon, Lee Thompson had demonstrated an aptitude for visual storytelling and a flair for imaginative shot composition while coaxing compelling performances from his actors. Late in 1952 he noticed a new book from Victor Gollancz which was causing a stir, reaching its fifth impression within two months of publication. It may be a worn-flat cliché, but this was to be the book that changed Lee Thompson's life. He read the book called Who Lie in Gaol by Joan Henry, and fell in love with her. Lee Thompson quickly set to work with Joan Henry and Anne Burnaby to develop a screenplay which would blend social criticism and melodrama with the leavening ingredient of comedy.

Chartist activist John Watkins’s 1841 play John Frost treats the Newport rising of 1839, in which 9000 armed miners marched on the Welsh market town of Newport. Two dozen Chartists were killed in a confrontation there with soldiers, and three leaders were sentenced to death in the last mass treason trials in British history. Named for the rising’s leader, John Frost dramatises these gripping events in a five-act verse tragedy. For much of the following year the question of how Newport would be remembered dominated editorial writing in the movement’s most important journals, which debated the question of ‘physical force’ and the viability of an insurrectionary strategy for a democratic movement. Watkins’s play was a significant intervention in these debates. Using the affordances of theatre to explore questions of agency, violence, and responsibility in ways written verse could not, John Frost insisted that Newport should be considered an insurrectionary moment and that the blood of Chartist martyrs should be redeemed through further struggle. The editor’s introduction discusses some half-dozen performances of the work, which evidence the contested legacy of Newport and suggests the national scope of Chartist dramatic culture.

Robert Bresson's Notes sur le cinématographe, first published in 1975 and reissued in 1988 with a short preface by the novelist J. M. G. le Clézio, distils a quarter-century's reflection upon the principles and practice of cinematography. It is quite common for European filmmakers in particular to write about cinema, but generally in the form of either journalistic articles, or attempts at constructing a theory of cinema. Notes sur le cinématographe fits into neither of these categories, and indeed could even be said not to be about 'cinema' at all, which for Bresson is the contrary of cinematography. Bresson's strictures on music in the section entitled 'De la musique' may appear surprising if we think of his use of Mozart in Un condamné or of Monteverdi at the end of Mouchette.

This chapter asks why kingship has survived and flourished in Malaysia. The particular record of British involvement with the different kingdoms of the country provides part of the explanation; but also, the indigenous institution possessed specific features that help account for its continuing resilience. Monarchy has been more important politically and socially in the Malay world (and probably most of Southeast Asia) than, for instance, in India – and Malay rulers have also possessed a capacity to adapt to foreign civilisations, as well as experience in operating as a small player in hierarchies. Apart from the British incursion, Malaysian monarchs have faced challenges from Fundamentalist Islam, anti-feudal nationalism and the demands of a large non-Malay minority – and these challenges continue to be present today.

This chapter begins by surveying the work of José Luis Guerin and contextualises his career, his films and their reception within arguments relating to the relationship between local, European and world cinema. Thereafter, a revision of his earlier, complementary works leads to an analysis of En la ciudad de Sylvia/In the City of Sylvia and its construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of memory and myth by allusion to Henri Bergson's theory of an intuitive sense of the durée (duration) of time and its relevance to Gilles Deleuze's theory of the time-image, as well as the affined philosophies of the flâneur and the psychogeography of the dérive (drift) as practised by Guy Debord and the Situationist International. The aim is to delineate a textual analysis of a peculiar example of the contemporary Spanish art-house and to reveal a progressive, modernist, even Cubist notion of cinema that is exemplified in this film's elaboration.

What became of the five Cato Street conspirators who pleaded guilty and were transported for life to Australia? Kieran Hannon has traced their lives in the decades after 1820. Their personal lives and professional careers suggest that they were men who could find gainful employment and maintain a range of personal and professional relationships. They were men who could thrive in an environment which did not condemn them to poverty and drive them to desperation.

The chapter will critically assess Chebel’s thought via an engagement with a variety of his monographs, essays and articles published in France between 2002 and 2016. Despite the wide range of topics under discussion in Chebel’s work, it is possible to nevertheless identify a number of recurring themes such as reason, subjectivity, secularism, the body, love and sexuality in Islam. His approach could be described as a project of cultural translation, in which Chebel can be regarded as a cultural mediator who seeks to productively confront non-Western and Western concepts of religion, spirituality, modernity and humanism. Of specific significance is Chebel’s foregrounding of a language of Islamic secularism, which can be interpreted as an attempt to transform perceptions of Islam and thus to intervene in the symbolic relationship between the Republican ideology of laïcité and France’s Muslim citizens.

The Introduction explains why the book is needed, defines the core concepts of the book and provides an overview of its theoretical framework, methodology, structure, argument and contributions.

Chapter 3 describes the conflict at Cambridge between Thomas Cartwright, Lady Margaret lecturer in divinity, and John Whitgift, future Archbishop of Canterbury. Cartwright, a gifted lecturer, threatened the establishment by supporting the election of bishops on scriptural grounds. As an undergraduate, Spenser witnessed the ‘takeover’ by Whitgift and Andrew Perne, who ‘reformed’ the university statutes, making them more restrictive than they had been under Catholic Mary Tudor, to oust Cartwright. Heads of colleges had to approve degrees before they could be awarded. A spin-off from these conflicts affected Gabriel Harvey’s receipt of the M.A. in 1573. Since Spenser received the B.A. from Pembroke College in 1573, Harvey cannot have served as Spenser’s tutor. His M.A. was not awarded until after Spenser had graduated, and it required the intervention of John Young, Master of Pembroke College, for the degree to be awarded.

Everybody Wins was adapted by Arthur Miller from his own two-character, one-act play, Some Kind of Love Story, which was first presented in tandem with Elegy for a Lady in 1982. Much of the film's post-structural enigma lies in the fact that, as Karel Reisz himself puts it, 'The event, the violence, the betrayals, are largely offscreen'. The story is about the undercurrents, the things undisclosed - what seems is not always what is'. Similar to Samuel Beckett's first published balletic mime, Reisz shot the sixteen-minute Act Without Words I, with no dialogue at all. Beckett's protagonist's struggles and inventions fail, all the better to produce an artistic success as pure line of flight, much like the pure freedom of Nietzsche's Zarathustra. It is as if Reisz were saying, when all else fails, we always have the boundless absurdity of art itself to help us fail even better.

Law, money, educational training, knowledge, politics, and power play some role in the workings of each social system. Yet it would be wrong to suppose that social systems are states in miniature. It would also be wrong to suppose that social systems function like regional states within an overarching nation state. Modern societies are constituted in ways that enable a specific social system, designated as the political system, to emerge and assume responsibility for the impersonal sharing and transfer of power. Attempts to strategically de-differentiate systems for the purposes of taking control and steering them have lead in some instances to the re-personalisation of the exercise of power, corruption, and other kinds of democratic deficits. It is no longer feasible to imagine political authority as having a pyramidal structure that absorbs democratic inputs in a vertically structured process culminating in the state. Similarly, it is no longer possible to see the fundamentally important constitutional dimension of statehood as being limited to the official separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Statehood today has to be reappraised in light of the potentially constitutional dimensions of social systems and the possibilities for inter-systemic communication.

Intolerance consists of four stories separated historically in time and space. Each story was shot and organised differently and each refers to established and successful film genres: the Babylon story to Italian spectacle films, the Christ story to films of the Passion, the story of the seventeenth century St Bartholomew's massacre to French Films d'Art, the modern story to the melodramas that David Wark Griffith had perfected. If the narrative elements of which Intolerance is composed were already familiar, Griffith's ordering of these was unique. In Intolerance, the counter-shot comes from a different universe. Clearly, it was Griffith's intention to employ the system of parallel montage for Intolerance but on a grander, more ambitious, and, as it turned out, abstract scale.